Miss Florida pageant crowns wrong winner, takes title from contestant six days later

The Miss Florida web site shows Elizabeth Fechtel as the pageant's 2014 winner on Saturday, June 28, 2014. The title was awarded to Victoria Cowen six days after the pageant when a scoring error was discovered. (MissFlorida.org)

Six days after Elizabeth Fechtel was crowned Miss Florida 2014, pageant officials told her that the tiara should have gone to someone else. The judges discovered a scoring error during a routine recount of the ballots this week and met with Fechtel on Thursday to tell her that Victoria Cowen of Panama City was the rightful winner. Cowen, originally designated as runner-up, was awarded the title and will represent Florida in the Miss America pageant in September.

"Our organization had to do the right thing, and the right thing is to crown the young woman that was intended to be crowned," Mary Sullivan, executive director of the Miss Florida pageant, told NBC News.

The confusion started when a judge changed his mind at the last minute and drew lines on the left side of his ballot, intending to swap the order of Fechtel and Cowen on his ballot, Fechtel's mother told The Orlando Sentinel. The auditors tabulating the ballots did not take the reordering into account and declared Fechtel the winner.

The Miss Florida web site still showed Fechtel as the 2014 winner on Saturday. Cowen and Fechtel are reportedly friends who grew close during the pageant. Neither has spoken publicly since the change was announced.

Fechtel had made multiple media appearances since being crowned last Saturday in St. Petersburg. Fechtel's father, Vince Fechtel, told the Tampa Bay Times, she had canceled her classes at the University of Florida for the fall to focus full-time on competing in the Miss America pageant.

"Just like me and her mother, she was extremely upset, for a lot of different reasons," Vince Fechtel said. "We were very concerned that it be clear that Elizabeth did nothing wrong, absolutely nothing, and she had spent all this time working. We were very distraught."